Ebert on creationists

I await 'Creation' not with anticipation, for as Roger Ebert predicts, those who admire Darwin are likely to be disappointed. Read Ebert's non-review.

Ebert muses over what caused Darwin to delay publication of The Origin, mentioning the possible theological implications of his theory. Then he says,

Did it occur to Darwin or his wife that nothing in his ideas precluded the existence of God? Today, no major religion finds conflict between God and the theory of evolution. The majority of Christians can live with both ideas; religious opposition to Darwin is limited primarily to a fundamentalist minority of American Christians.

Beg your pardon?

Oh sure, nothing about evolution precludes the existence of God, unless one has specific ideas about what 'God' means. And I think we can all agree to be fairly certain that to Charles and Emma it meant Yahweh - the one who created the heavens and humans in their present form, etc. etc. The creation myth that goes with that interpretation of the Bible is too in direct conflict with evolutionary biology. It does not preclude the existence of some god, but it does preclude that God did the things that Emma and (earlier) Darwin most likely attributed to God.

No major religion finds conflict between evolution and God?! Ebert, do you spend all your time inside a theological seminary? Because that's the only place where Christians are 100% comfortable with evolution, and those Christian professors of theology are really atheists. (If you don't believe me go to a talk about 'Ground of Being' and other such stuff, or read Tillich.)

Baptists, Evangelicals, Mormons, and Pentecostals are definitely not very comfortable with evolution, and many lutherans are likely to profess some sort of ID preference (whether they know of the discotute or not). At least, none of these denominations are deists, and evolution, astronomy, geophysics, nuclear physics, and geology together pretty much thwart anything but strict deism. If it wasn't for cognitive dissonance the heads of most of 'the majority of Christians' would be seen exploding on a daily basis.

Perhaps we can designate those American Christians who oppose evolution as 'fundamentalists', but then we would have to include more than what can be called a minority. Or vice versa.

Also, have Ebert heard what followers of that other major religion of the world, Islam, think about evolution? Muslims are hardcore creationists, and the vast majority are totally unable to "live with both ideas."

But, while I think Ebert is wholly uninformed on this matter, he ends with a good point:

Meanwhile, have you wondered why, if the Mayans were able to pinpoint the end of time in 2012, they were unable to see that their own civilization would collapse in the ninth century?

Pleiotropy comes from the Greek πλείων pleion, meaning "more", and τρέπειν trepein, meaning "to turn, to convert". It designates the occurrence of a single gene affecting multiple traits, and is a hugely important concept in evolutionary biology.

I'm a postdoc at UC Santa Barbara.

All Many aspects of evolution interest me, but my research focus is currently on microbial evolution, adaptive radiation, speciation, fitness landscapes, epistasis, and the influence of genetic architecture on adaptation and speciation.